Collecting Secrets From Lespinasse

By BRYAN MILLER with PIERRE FRANEY

Published: March 16, 1994

WHEN Gray Kunz was an inquisitive 8-year-old growing up in Singapore, he relished visiting the city's outdoor food markets, those deliciously exotic bazaars perfumed with cumin, cardamom, mustard seed, chutneys and tropical fruits.

"Those memories haunted me for years," said the 38-year-old Mr. Kunz, the chef of Lespinasse in the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, as he prepared one of his beguiling meals recently in the kitchen of Pierre Franey's house in East Hampton, L.I. Lespinasse received a four-star rating in a restaurant review in The New York Times last Friday.

Mr. Kunz's extensive knowledge of Eastern flavors combined with his solid training in classical French cuisine has propelled him to the front ranks of American chefs who specialize in so-called fusion cooking.

"I really don't like that term," the boyish-looking Mr. Kunz said as he meticulously arranged his spices on a work island. "We deal with all kinds of flavors to create a subtle new taste sensation, but a lot of people doing this kind of cooking simply go crazy with it, and they call it fusion."

Examples of Mr. Kunz's style on the Lespinasse menu include marinated crab meat with lime and a melon-citrus sauce, ragout of squab with turmeric under a rice-flour crepe, and steamed black bass seasoned with kaffir leaf.

For this home-cooking exercise, Mr. Kunz was asked to use only ingredients and equipment within the reach of most home cooks. He agreed, although he did throw a few curve balls in the form of black mustard seed and green cardamom (available primarily in Indian groceries). We learned something else by having a professional take over a home kitchen: chefs run through more pots and pans than health clubs do towels. To ease the pot-scrubbing burden, the recipes here include modifications of some of Mr. Kunz's techniques.

The menu Mr. Kunz suggested for this dinner had French roots and Eastern accents, most notably from Thailand, India and Malaysia. It started with crisp, fresh smelts served with confit of turnips in a vinegar and tomato fondue, followed by a fricassee of spring greens with turmeric and a rice-flour crepe; black bass in watercress broth with ginger and fava beans; braised veal flank with a roasted-vegetable sauce and savoy cabbage, and chilled rhubarb soup with strawberries and caramel-coated vanilla ice cream.

Work started about noon, with Mr. Franey at the chef's side making sure he measured every ingredient -- something restaurant professionals rarely do. Mr. Kunz usually seasons by tasting repeatedly and adjusting. Several times, Mr. Franey caught him with seasonings in mid-toss and forced him to use a measuring cup. "I know I'm driving you crazy," Mr. Franey said. The eminently polite Mr. Kunz just smiled.

Mr. Kunz started with a cold dessert that needed time to chill, chopping stalks of rhubarb with blinding speed and razor precision.

He is a compulsive taster. "Subtlety is what you have to achieve," he said while sipping the yet-unsweetened soup for the sixth time. "You can only get that by constantly tasting throughout the cooking process." The finished rhubarb soup had an exquisite balance of sour from the rhubarb and lemon, and sweet from the sugar and strawberries.

Mr. Kunz spent his early years in Singapore with his Irish-born mother and Swiss father, who was in the silver trade. "We had two cooks in the house, and I always hung around the kitchen and asked them questions about what they were doing," he recalled. When he was 10, the family moved back to Switzerland. At 16, Mr. Kunz began his formal cook's apprenticeship in Bern, at a French restaurant in the railroad station. Three-and a half years later, he continued his classical French training in Lausanne at the venerable Beau-Rivage Palace, a summer resort hotel. He finished his hotel-based training at Beaur-au-Lac in Zurich.

As Mr. Kunz spoke, he began to assemble the smelts, trimming the fillets and pinning them into oval shapes with toothpicks.

He dredged the smelts in an oddly familiar looking substance. "It's Cream of Wheat!" he said, adding that it stays crunchier than bread crumbs when fried. The definitely crunchy smelts were enhanced by sweet turnips, shallots, tomatoes and a vinegar sauce spiked with port.

The next dish was fricassee of spring greens with turmeric, which began with blanching each of the vegetables. It was a fairly involved process, with many steps that came together at the last minute in a swirl of toasted cardamom, anise and cumin.

The rough-textured crepes were made with long-grain rice and white lentils. "Every Eastern culture has a crepe or bread of some kind, and I have been trying to come up with something different," Mr. Kunz said.

The crepes were indeed different, thin and faintly crunchy and embedded with leaves of fresh rosemary.

Returning to a discussion of his career, Mr. Kunz noted that his big break came in 1979, when the famed Swiss chef Fredy Girardet recruited him for his three-star kitchen in Crissier -- somewhat akin to the Yankees calling up a hot high school shortstop.